GTK3 Work Towards EGL X11 Support, GTK4 Vulkan Merged

GNOME developers continue work on the GTK4 tool-kit while GTK3 is still set to receive some improvements.

This week's weekly GTK.org blog post points out that there's a code branch for letting GTK's GDK back-end support EGL on X11 as an alternative to its existing GLX support. GTK does support EGL on Wayland, but currently not under X11/X.Org. Hopefully that branch will end up in good shape: GLX still dominates on the Linux desktop and it's been a while since any major efforts for killing GLX with EGL. It was with Plasma 5.8 on the KDE side where they had actually dropped their EGL on X11 support, preferring to stick to GLX. KDE dropped the EGL X11 option over bug reports and rendering issues.

In the GTK4 space, Benjamin Otte is working on refactoring the GSK (GTK Scene Kit) render node API and he merged the Vulkan renderer for GSK. This Vulkan renderer is an alternative to GTK4's current OpenGL and Cairo renderers. Landing the Vulkan renderer also resulted in a refactoring of the OpenGL support.